Thread: New study rules US an Oligarchy rather than a Democracy

So check this out, we've got Hillary Clinton generating a warhawk public personage, Fox News pundits repeatedly wishing Obama would be more like Putin or Natinyahu (and basically praising fear-based leadership), the Koch brothers have purchased the GOP and have already paid for 10% of all political advertisements across the country this year and are essentially calling all the shots, including their next presidential bid.

The Koch brothers' father was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society, and while there's a lot of discontinuity within the family I think it's safe to say that the Koch Brothers remain the major power brokers of the John Birch Society, reminiscent of the Thule Society back around Germany following world war 1. The Thule Society put up Hitler as a strong, charismatic puppet to carry out their ideology. Likewise, I think the Kochs are gearing up to put a warhawk forward in the 2016 bid following 2 more years of CIA managed chaos to make Americans so afraid they cling to such a leader. And even if they don't get terrified quite enough to go with a hard-nosed fascist, Hillary Clinton will just carry out the same policies anyway.

Yep. And of course Hillary will be just as untouchable as Obama - it's just that if you disagree with her you're a sexist, not a racist. Glad to see you could pop bacon OP.

(That was supposed to say pop back in. Left it because awesome and funny. Now I want some popbacon!)

What makes you think they're controlling the JBS?

If Rand Paul wins the next presidential election, which he very well might, a lot of my faith in American politics will be restored. I don't agree with him on everything, but he would be an enormous step in the right direction.

Originally Posted by Universal Mind

If Rand Paul wins the next presidential election, which he very well might, a lot of my faith in American politics will be restored. I don't agree with him on everything, but he would be an enormous step in the right direction.

Rand Paul won't even win the primary. And Hillary will stomp whichever republican runs. 2016 will be a landslide democrat victory.

Did anyone mention the book 1984 yet? If not, I just mentioned it. There's also this line at the end of the comedy The Dictator starring Sacha Baron Cohen:

Spoiler for The Dictator quote at end about America:

Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation's wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.

It should be obvious that America's political system does not function in the truest sense of a Democracy and I think the failure to recognize this is due to the amount of interference, media, and brainwashing that separates us from real truths and real information.

Also, in 1984, practically the last third of the book is about Oceania being an oligarchy. But what Orwell was doing was warning us about what America could turn into. And I think if you relate Orwell's explanation of a oligarchy in 1984 to what America is now, they fit together nicely, and frighteningly so. It gets so detailed and in depth that I feel like Orwell saw this coming and was doing his best to cover all his thoughts as clear as possible. There's too much to it now for me to respond all at once, but will be back later.

Show me a country with hundreds of millions of people that isn't an oligarchy. The real problem is that the US started off with a million people, and it now has 350 million. The government institutions worked quite well for the colonies, but they didn't scale well. At the very least, the US must break apart into smaller countries to become barely functional.

Canada, Germany, France, the UK, etc all have sizable populations and a sustainable version of capitalism and politics. Even Warren Buffet got called a socialist for trying to protect American democracy from the corrupting influence of uncapped spending. We do have the opportunity to protect the democracy with a large population, we sustained the democracy just fine back when college was bein subsidized and we were investing in the middle class. Globalization caused the middle class to flatline and thus went the economy, don't blame democracy itself.

Originally Posted by cmind

Show me a country with hundreds of millions of people that isn't an oligarchy. The real problem is that the US started off with a million people, and it now has 350 million. The government institutions worked quite well for the colonies, but they didn't scale well. At the very least, the US must break apart into smaller countries to become barely functional.

I was thinking earlier that governments in general have these types of problems. So its not exclusive to America but I think it is a good case and point since it is supposed to set the standard example for the international community. That part about the US breaking into smaller countries makes me think "I really need to get out of Indiana when that happens" haha. In all seriousness though, that is a interesting idea I haven't thought of that before. Each state pretty much has varying differences and cultures anyway so I don't know.

Ugh I am just prolonging my longer post, but I will add an excerpt from 1984 in the meantime, from Part II Chapter 9:

Spoiler for 1984, Part II, Chapter 9:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF

OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by

Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston began reading:

Chapter I

Ignorance is Strength

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...

Chapter III

War is Peace.

... (I skipped through some paragraphs explaining politics in Oceania, but they are good as well)

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

...

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.

That was a bit of a wall of text; you can find the full copy of 1984 if you search google or stop by your local library

Anyway, there's some things in there like doublethink (having two contradictory thoughts or concepts) and proles (basically the poor and average citizens) that might be unfamiliar concepts, but I think the rest is relate-able. To me these are very stoic and cold views of war and very mechanical and dark. Like everything is a cog in a machine. Orwell goes in depth into the actual part about oligarchies as well, and its interesting how he gives the main character this book, so it adds another layer to this story. I had forgotten that the last part of the book is a mind-**** that the main character goes through and is even more insane than this whole section.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

Canada, Germany, France, the UK, etc all have sizable populations

California has as many people as all of Canada.